Top Ten Blog Entries for 2010
It’s that time of year when we take a few minutes to look back and reflect. I asked Google Analytics to do some of the work for me, and it came up with these blog entries, written in 2010, which received the most traffic during the year.
- 6 News Stories to Connect to Orwell’s 1984
Big brother really is watching you and the students you teach. These news stories (check the comments for additional links) talk about how schools and communities are using big brother tactics to track what you do.
- Top 10 Things to Do with a Banned Text
This List of Ten shares ways that students can think critically about censorship, focusing primarily on argument and persuasion.
- Text + Image = Tagxedo: The Next Generation of Word Cloud Fun
Word cloud-driven analysis (like Wordle) is ready to move to the next level with Tagxedo, which shapes your cloud of words into an image.
- List of Ten: Fun with Crayons
This collection of assignment prompts focuses on crayons, everything from color names to childhood memories.
- 38 Ways to Write about Writing
A collection of links to 38 ways that students can reflect on the writing they are doing, the strategies they use, and the different experiences they have had as writers.
- What’s the Trick to Building Community in the Classroom?
Online or off, getting students to talk to each other is a tricky task. These three lessons about building community in the business world, make a lot of sense in the classroom too.
- 6 Reasons Blogrolls Are Dying
When I tried to update a comp/rhet blogroll list, I found that blogrolls seem to be a dying breed.
- Thanksgiving Classroom Discussion: The Meaning of Thanksgiving
It turns out Mark Twain was a bit harsh about Thanksgiving, according to an exceprt from his newly-published autobiography. Turn the short passage into a classroom discussion of culture and commercialism.
- Turning Blog Posts Into a Book Draft
Thanks to NaNoWriMo and Literature & Latte’s Scrivener, I turned a variety of notes and blog posts into a very rough and informal book draft of 52,967 words!
- Literary Lists of “Ten Best”
This round-up features unusual literary lists (like 10 best tattoos or 10 best pairs of glasses in liteature) from an ongoing series published in the UK newspaper The Guardian. See the comments for links to more.
So that's 2010. I was surprised by the popularlity of the Orwell post. I just happened upon several stories and threw them into the post. Lots of teachers seem to come to it however, and it was even linked in October from the New York Times Learning Blog. Who knew I’d ever get a shoutout from the New York Times? Not bad, as I look back at my personal blog writing. Not bad at all.
[Image: HP Winter Summit 2010 by negotiable_me, on Flickr]
